[meteorite-list] NPA 09-21-1952 La Paz on going to the moon

[MARK BOSTICK]

Paper: Mansfield News Journal
City: Mansfield, Ohio
Date: September 21, 1952
Page: 8-C

Better Patch Space Suit
You'll Be Buying Ticket To Moon

     ALBUQUERQUE (AP) - Better make sure your space suit is not full of 
holes and your rocket ship has a pressurized cabin before you take off for 
the moon.
     Otherwise, the chances are pretty slim that you'll live to tell the 
boys:

     "THERE I was. 52,000 feet up, when the cabin seems split and my oxygen 
supply quit."
     The scientists say that about that time, your blood will start boiling 
and you'll drown in your own vaporized breath.
     What the best - informed brains of the nation figure are the odds that 
you'll really be buying a ticket on the moon express are contained in a book 
from the University of New Mexico Press. The 650-page volume is called 
"Physics and Medicine of the Upper Atmosphere."
     "The conquest of the atmosphere is a revolutionary event comparable to 
the transition of aquatic animals to land animals" to land animals in 
geological time." writes one of the scientists. "That took 100 million 
years." But most of the advances in space research have been in the past 
decade, many of them at White Sands proving ground in southern New Mexico.

     THE book is the result of a roundtable of rocketship travel in San 
Antonio, Tex., last November, and incorporates the findings of 35 military, 
scientific and medical minds. They conclude, in effect, that a trip to the 
moon certainly isn't impossible.
     Dr. Lincoln La Paz, associate editor of the book and head of the UNM 
meteoritics department, goes even farther.
     "The next step probably will be sending men up in the rocket." La Paz 
said. "It may well have happened already - although that's only an educated 
guess."
     But he says meteroticists - metal fireball experts - have been asked to 
check into the possibilities of a rocket traveler's (1) running head-on into 
a meteorite in a lunar traffic jam and (2) his being cooking alive in 
radiation from Cosmic rays.

     FURTHER, he says, the picture in front of the book - taken nearly a 
year ago - is an early model of the Navy's skyrocket jet plane which 
recently flew more than 1,200 miles an hour - twice the speed of sound - at 
an altitude of more than 70,000 feet.
     This is nearly four miles higher than the space studies contained in 
the book, and La Paz says current space charts he has seen indicate that 
rockets have gone as high as 500 miles - although not with a pilot aboard.
     If this is the case - and any confirmation still is in the drawer 
marked super - duper top secret - it tops the previous record altitude mark 
set two years ago by a two-stage rocket launched at White Sands. That WAC 
Corporal, shot from the nose of a V-2, went only 200 miles up.
     But before you head for the moon, half - cooked, take a look at what 
you'll need besides that space suit:

     AN EJECTOR pod to catapult you from the rocket shop in case anything 
goes wrong, automatically opening a parachute to let you safely to earth.
     A parachute made of something that won't melt when you generate a heat 
of 540 degrees Fahrenheit - more than twice the boiling point - by falling 
500,000 feet at 100 feet a second. Nylon melts at 480 degrees. The Air Force 
is working on something that won't.
     Intestinal Fortitude.

(end)

Lincoln La Paz was born in my hometown of Wichita, Kansas.

Mark Bostick
www.meteoritearticles.com